Wow. Best car ever.

The diet is okay, I guess. I'm feeling hungry most of the time, so I have to be wary about sugar crashes: for many months now I've been pumping myself full of simple sugars (fruit and fruit juices, mostly) to keep myself going hour by hour. Mostly I'm frustrated by having to cook everything for myself: I haven't been doing it over the past eighteen months because I haven't wanted to. On top of that, the restricted food list focuses on lots of stuff I don't know how to use, like cumin, coriander and turmeric. But that's okay. I'm committed to trying it for at least a couple of months; something should have changed by then. I'm sure I'll lose weight and be healthier just from cooking for myself, if nothing else.

I'm starting to warm up for the beatboxing competition on Friday. I'm pretty excited, actually. There are some cool people doing demos rather than competing, which is great because they'd kick my ass (that's an mp3 of a guy beatboxing while playing the flute--yes, it's just him). I'm digging up beatboxing mp3s, understanding the form a bit to see what the audience will be expecting. Lots of scratch noises, apparently, which aren't really my thing, but maybe I can work something up. Musically, beatboxing comes out of hip-hop, where vocal percussion (VP, my thing) comes out of a cappella rock bands, so from what I've heard it's fair to glibly describe vocal percussion as sounding more "white". VP tends to go for verisimilitude, or at least not being too identifiably human; beatboxing has no such pretensions, for instance using a "ps" syllable for a snare drum instead of "pf", and a lot of flapping the lips with the mouth clenched tight, like what we used to do for farting noises as kids.

Basically I'm still stuck with my initial impression that I could do really well, or not so much. (My current replacement in the Irrationals is, uh, quite good, though seems to be riffing off stuff Bobby McFerrin did a long time ago.)